Evolutionary theories concerning the origins of human intelligence suggest that cultural transmission might be biased toward social over non-social information. This was tested by passing social and non-social information along multiple chains of participants. Experiment 1 found that gossip, defined as information about intense third-party social relationships, was transmitted with significantl...

It has been claimed that a meaningful theory of cultural evolution is not possible because human beliefs and behaviors do not follow predictable patterns. However, theoretical models of cultural transmission and observations of the development of societies suggest that patterns in cultural evolution do occur. Here, we analyze whether two sets of related cultural traits, one tested against the e...

Cultural transmission typically results in a network of connections between cultural units (such as individuals or social groups), not the branching patterns of descent seen in genetic inheritance. As a consequence, the application of phylogenetic (or evolutionary clustering) methods to cultural history faces methodological problems. Most importantly, the history of relationships inferred throu...

Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of ‘representations.’ Recently, cognitive anthropologists have criticized such models. They make three points: mental representations are non-discrete, cultural transmission is highly inaccurate, and mental representations are not replicated, but rather ...

We explore the impact of age on cultural change through simulations of cultural evolution. Our simulations show that common observations about the relationship between old and young naturally emerge from repeated cultural learning. In particular, young individuals are more open to learn than older individuals, they are less effective as cultural models, and they possess less cultural traits. We...

Oliphant [5, 6] contends that language is the only naturally-occurring, learned symbolic communication system, because only humans can accurately observe meaning during the cultural transmission of communication. This paper outlines several objections to Oliphant’s argument. In particular, it is argued that the learning biases necessary to support learned symbolic communication may not be commo...

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2014.04.027 0003-3472/ 2014 The Authors. Published on behalf license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) Cultural variation can be conceptualized in two main ways: as culture-specific qualitative differences in behavioural form, and also as quantitative variation in performance of constellations of universal behaviours (cultural style). Despite obse...

Cultural transmission is a key component of human evolution. Two of humans' closest living relatives, chimpanzees and orangutans, have also been argued to transmit behavioral traditions across generations culturally [1-3], but how much the process might resemble the human process is still in large part unknown. One key phenomenon of human cultural transmission is majority-biased transmission: t...

The perpetuation of a family’s position in the distribution of income from parents to children reflects the genetic and cultural transmission of individual traits, as well as the inheritance of group memberships and income-earning assets. We show that the extent of intergenerational economic status transmission is considerably greater than was thought to be the case a generation ago, the geneti...